This is a wonderful anthology, perfect for releasing today in the month of April, "the cruelest month." (Page 39: From the introductory line of "The Wasteland.") Mary Karr's introduction is insightful. Eliot innovated a new modern style that remains influential. Since reading Karr and the poems, I have been experiencing days as a sort of collage, the astute description Karr applies to Eliot's style.


Amazon Editorial Review

Also includes Prufrock and Other Observations, Poems (1920), and The Sacred Wood
Introduction by Mary Karr

First published in 1922, “The Waste Land,” T. S. Eliot’s masterpiece, is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot’s poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a potent new poetic language. As Kenneth Rexroth wrote, Eliot “articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression.” As commanding as his verse, Eliot’s criticism also transformed twentieth-century letters, and this Modern Library edition includes a selection of Eliot’s most important essays.

A weakness for me is that this selection does not contain one of my favorite's Eliot's "Four Quartets." Perhaps that poem was too long for this anthology.

Here is a passage to be pondered from "Four Quartets," "East Corker:"

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

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